Call Of The Spear [EN]: Chapter 362

Romance of Nangseon – Part 2, Episode 71

A place darker than the lightless abyss, deeper than the night.

A woman stood in a space akin to a sea of chaos, gazing at a black entity, and dropped a red thread.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

The black entity responded to her question.

[I’m fine. It’s all according to plan. It’s to connect with him. I’m alright.]

Its tone seemed to subtly wish for reassurance. The woman wanted to say more, but she couldn’t.

How could she not understand the heart that suppressed the longing to meet?

“The cultivation method I gave him was incomplete. What if…”

[Enough. Stop it. He’s fine.]

He had to be fine.

The black entity desperately hoped so.

* * *

Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water.

He infused the energies of the Five Elements into his body, then divided them into the Eight Trigrams.

☰Heaven (乾), ☱Lake (兌), ☲Fire (離), ☳Thunder (震), ☴Wind (巽), ☵Water (坎), ☶Mountain (艮), ☷Earth (坤)—divided, they are heaven and earth, mountain and swamp, fire and wind, water and thunder, rooted in the Five Elements, which are the Eight Trigrams, which are nature, the power of heaven and earth.

Cheonbeom recited the incantation of the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Gods countless times, his lips moving.

However, once a path diverged, it was difficult to twist it back.

He wanted to sever the circulation of energy, but instinctively, Beom realized that if he forcibly cut it off now, the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Gods that had permeated his body would steal something from him.

‘Damn it.’

Beom’s body began to glow brighter and brighter.

The mysterious light of the Eight Trigrams emanated from his entire body, dyeing the sky and radiating dazzling light in all directions.

“Kkeueueueuk!!”

It was as if his whole body was burning, excruciatingly painful.

He never imagined that he, who had trained in the Hwasintong [a fire-based martial art], would feel such pain.

It wasn’t just a feeling.

Beom’s entire body was turning black, its light fading.

This phenomenon occurred because the power of the Eight Trigrams could not properly permeate and was circulating inside and outside Beom’s body.

His skin, charred black, cracked, and flames erupted from within.

Cheonbeom’s entire body ignited.

At the same time, immense pain assailed him. Beom’s pupils lost their reason.

Burning gold, Beom plummeted from the sky to the ground.

* * *

“Have you found him!?”

“Not yet!”

Cheonbeom, who had been the talk of the Shangshu [a prominent sect or organization], had suddenly disappeared.

Saha bit down hard.

He should have checked when he felt a sudden surge of intense energy.

But he hadn’t.

Because the place where that energy was felt was where Beom had been.

He thought it was nothing.

He was a guy who always did unexpected things, and he thought it was part of his desire to quietly cultivate for a while.

And that naive thought made all the cultivators of the Shangshu see a golden meteor falling from the clear sky.

The golden meteor with a long tail passed through the Shangshu and fell into the Geonwon Sea.

No one thought it was Beom, and it wasn’t until quite some time later that they found out.

‘Half a year.’

It had been half a year since then.

For a cultivator in the world of Taoism, half a year was fleeting.

Ten years could pass just by secluding oneself to contemplate the body.

But even cultivators who lived lives close to eternal life died eventually.

There was no difference in the urgency of life.

The higher the chance of survival if found quickly, the same was true.

“Patriarch, if we go any further, we might be swept away by the waves of the Geonwon Sea!”

Moreover, he had fallen into the Geonwon Sea.

It was too difficult to search because he had fallen into the Geonwon Sea.

Perhaps if they couldn’t find him like this….

There was a high possibility that they would never find him.

Saha blankly stared at the Geonwon Sea, which was nothing but white mist itself.

“Where are you?”

What could have gone wrong with such a cautious guy?

He couldn’t understand.

The Beom he knew was someone who survived and overcame any situation.

There was no way he would have died from something like this.

In the meantime, someone among those searching for Beom said something.

“Those guys already….”

It was Umyeong.

Saha also began to have strange thoughts at his mumbling.

Half a year ago, Cheonbeom was the one who voluntarily entered the Peng Clan’s trap and annihilated them.

There was a possibility that those guys had already moved….

Saha shook his head.

More than that, he had to find Beom now.

Everything else was secondary.

* * *

Thud, thud, thud.

The sound of water droplets falling at regular intervals tickled his ears.

He had no sense of his body, but strangely, he could hear the sound clearly.

‘Where am I?’

With difficulty, he moved his eyelids, and what he saw was the ground.

Lush-looking herbs were lined up, and tiny insects were gathered in groups, moving around.

Rolling his eyes around to look around, Cheonbeom realized that he was tied to some tree trunk.

Tok, toktok.

Above his head, some water droplets continued to fall, wetting his head.

Unable to understand what it was, he tried to circulate his energy while contemplating his body, but a tsunami-like pain flooded him.

“Keoeok!”

Cheonbeom, who vomited a handful of blood, lost consciousness again due to the pain.

And how much time had passed?

When he opened his eyes again, the back of a man came into view.

A man with broad shoulders who looked reliable.

The man was silently grinding herbs, decocting them, and repeating the process, busy with his own work.

Then he glanced back and made eye contact with Beom.

He smirked.

As the man formed a hand seal, Beom’s body, which had been tied to the tree, was released.

The tree trunks released Beom and laid him down again like a bed.

The man muttered something and placed herbs and various insects on Beom’s body.

And a sticky, viscous substance.

The man spoke non-stop, but Beom couldn’t understand him at all.

And then he lost consciousness again.

The days of opening and closing his eyes were repeated. He could close them with relief because every time he opened them, his body was definitely getting better.

Each time, the man looked at him with a nasty smile, but his treatment was very effective anyway.

After a little time had passed, he realized that Beom’s body was severely ruptured both internally and externally at the time.

It was strange that he hadn’t died.

The charring of his body was also slowly disappearing.

The skin, which had cracked like tree bark, began to interlock, and new flesh sprouted, turning white.

Beom, who had spent most of his days sleeping, was now able to stay awake for half the time. However, he still couldn’t use his divine powers because the energy and blood in his body hadn’t recovered.

Therefore, he couldn’t properly know who that man was or what realm he possessed.

Then one day.

His vocal cords and tongue had recovered to some extent, so Beom asked him.

“Who… are… you…”

It was difficult to make a sound.

His voice was weak and rough, as if he had eaten iron filings and was speaking.

The man’s eyes widened as if he had realized something big at that voice.

“Yeah, who am I… Well, let’s just say I’m a man from the Insect World for now.”

It was a strangely friendly voice.

But the important thing wasn’t that.

Insect World! Then wasn’t this guy a Insect Immortal [a powerful being from the Insect World]?

‘Why is the Insect Immortal…’

Treating me?

Beom quickly replayed his memories from that time, but nothing really came to mind.

He seemed to have lost consciousness and fallen somewhere, but there was no way it could be the Insect World. No matter how close the Shangshu and the Insect World were, it wasn’t to that extent.

The distance between worlds, no matter how close, was hundreds or thousands of years.

In the Upper World, where proper alliances didn’t exist, there were no teleportation formations between worlds.

“Why… are… you… me…”

As he stammered, the man gave his usual nasty smile.

“Didn’t you open the Six Gates? We’ve been looking for someone who can open the gates of the Six Paths.”

Six Paths?

He didn’t know what he was talking about.

But he knew the word Six Gates.

“You have a face that says you don’t know what’s going on. It’s understandable enough. For now, let’s focus on recovering your body, and I’ll explain the rest later, so don’t worry too much.”

At his firm but subtly kind tone, Beom unknowingly closed his eyes again.

* * *

After some time had passed.

Beom realized that the man who had saved him was a Scent Immortal [a type of immortal specializing in scents and aromas].

The energy and blood had recovered a little.

The treatment of his body was going smoothly.

The black blood he had been vomiting every time he woke up had now stopped.

As the energy and blood recovered, the regenerative power of his body suddenly skyrocketed.

Originally, his body itself was no different from a treasure sword due to the Gyuncheon Bohwa [a technique or item that enhances the body’s resilience].

Moreover, he still had Subongyeosan [another technique or item] inside his body, so the speed of recovery began to increase extremely quickly.

“This is amazing.”

He thought he would be lying down for at least three hundred years. That was because Beom had suffered severe external and internal injuries.

He had been worried that he might die like this, so he had been treating him with anxiety.

However, once he reached a certain point, his recovery power increased dramatically, so he couldn’t help but be amazed.

“To have his body recover in just thirty years… it’s really amazing.”

Cheonbeom was now able to get up and walk.

However, that was talking about daily life, and he still had to work harder on treatment to have the appearance of a normal cultivator.

‘Haa….’

He didn’t know what was going on.

He had spent as much as thirty years recovering his body.

‘My vacation was for a year….’

He had rested thirty times that amount, so he didn’t know what face to return to the Water Palace with, and of course, he didn’t know how to look at Saha and the others.

‘First, recover my body….’

He would focus entirely on treatment and return to the Water World. He couldn’t pick up the spilled water, so there was no choice.

“I am grateful.”

“It’s just that we would be in trouble if you died.”

He was a Insect Immortal of the Insect World and told him to call himself Jonja.

Jonja was a fairly famous Scent Immortal, and he was said to be a person with a very high position and name even in the Insect World.

He even confidently said that he would ascend to the Origin Immortal within thousands of years.

And for that.

“You said you needed someone who opened the Six Gates. Why is that?”

Jonja glanced at Beom and replied.

“In the Insect World, there is an ancient artifact of our ancestors called the Six Severances and Thirty-Six Gates.”

It contained the true meaning of the ancestors, and the person who created it had a very unique innate divine power, and that divine power was needed to open the Six Severances and Thirty-Six Gates.

That was.

“The one who opened the Six Gates of the Monstrous Nose and Fish Horn.”

“That’s right, that’s right. It is said that if you open the Six Severances and Thirty-Six Gates, which were arranged for his successors so that no one could open them, there are great things inside that could even unify the Upper World.”

However, to open that gate, six people who could open the Six Gates were needed.

Six Severances and Thirty-Six Gates.

Six people who had opened the Six Gates had to gather at the gate with thirty-six eyes engraved on it to open the gate.

“Even among the eyes of those who inherited the bloodline of the Gold Foil Paper Lord, those who have opened the Six Gates are very, very rare. If the blood is thin or the enlightenment is insufficient, they often go crazy or explode before they can even open it.”

The eyes of the Gold Ingot seemed to be a special Dharma eye that inherited the bloodline called the Gold Foil Paper Lord.

“But, you don’t know exactly what’s inside that Six Severances and Thirty-Six Gates?”

“How could I not know? It’s a tomb.”

“A tomb?”

“It’s a tomb and at the same time….”

Jonja hesitated to say something and shook his head.

“There’s nothing certain until we open the gate. Rather, I want to ask you about what happened to you. What on earth did you do to get your body in that state?”

Beom, who was about to make something up, thought about it for a moment and just told him the truth.

He was a Scent Immortal.

Anyway, he was a cultivator with a higher realm than himself, so he calculated that he might get a clear answer.

And after a while.

Jonja distorted his face.

“Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Gods? How do you know that?”

“Do you know about it?”

“Of course I know, that’s a cultivation method of the Insect World!”